2013 Ford Fusion: Passion seizes the family sedan

DanNeil

Dan Neil/Wall Street Journal

The 2013 Ford Fusion

Out of all Ford’s trout-mouthed wonder cars, the expectations are highest for the Fusion, the company’s freshly redesigned C/D sedan, a segment that in the U.S. represents more than one million annual sales (Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Hyundai Sonata, Volkswagen Passat, etc.). Careers break upon such rocks. Engineers jump off buildings.

Auto makers devote themselves to a family sedan redesign with special zeal because getting it wrong means losing a generation of buyers, as well Ford
F, -1.48%
knows. Dearborn has raised the stakes for itself further because the Fusion—built on the CD4 global platform—represents the current best practices of the “One Ford” strategy, an effort to contain costs by building essentially the same vehicle for all global markets. According to Ford, the Fusion has 80% global parts commonality (Europhiles may prefer to think of it as buying four-fifths of a Mondeo. A miscue on the Fusion would reverberate through the product line for years to come.

Good thing it’s so awesome.

It’s received wisdom that an auto maker’s “halo” car—the car that builds the brand—is its flagship sports car, like Chrysler’s Viper or Porsche’s 918 Spyder. But the full measure of a company, I think, is found in these mass-market offerings, the dronish millions ginned up in global assembly halls sadly lacking in lore or romance. The regressive pressures on such products are enormous. Any family sedan that emerges from this process retaining some spark of lust, some allure, is a kind of industrial miracle.

And that brings us back to the Fusion, which I judge to be, now, the best car in the segment: best-looking, best-screwed-together, most likely to appeal to grown-ups. Look, it’s no Maserati—nor, despite eyewitness reports, an Aston Martin—but the Fusion is the rare family car that can ignite any kind of sustained desire. Heavy industry rarely comes with quite so much lyricism and shrewd aesthetic judgment.

Why so great? First of all, plainly, it’s a fine-looking automobile, with an athletic stature, an easy modernity and innate handsomeness that makes the Accord and Sonata seem fey*. The cab-rearward proportions and raked roofline nearly dispense with the deck-lid altogether. With the Fusion and the similarly silhouetted Kia Optima, we are entering an era of well-packaged fastback sedans, which I welcome.

Second, the Fusion is technically ambitious, with a suite of powertrain options from a base 2.5-liter four to a fairly radical plug-in hybrid powertrain (188 system horsepower with a 7.2-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack). Also in the mix are a six-speed manual transmission (rare in the sedan segment); optional all-wheel drive; a conventional hybrid system with a best-in-class EPA rating of 47 mpg; and a huffy 2.0-liter turbo/direct four with 240 hp and 270 pound-feet of torque. This is very postgraduate sausage making.

Third, the Fusion’s cockpit design finally brings some order, some architectural sobriety to what is becoming an increasingly cluttered and randomized space. The segment’s worst offender is the Honda Accord, whose cockpit presents the driver with disconnected islands of audio, climate and navigation information accessed through a rotary-quadrant controller, steering-wheel switches and (redundantly) a touch screen, with some twist knobs thrown in for good measure. It’s a madhouse.

As compared with the Ford’s cockpit, which organizes most vehicle functions into a sleek, sloped, matte-finish center stack—a “floating panel” with storage space underneath, between the footwells—and rotary controller in the center, below an 8-inch touch screen. Logical and legible, toggle-through animation—conveying mileage, trip, vehicle status and engine RPM—plays out on two LCD screens that flank the central analog speedo. Ford Sync’s touch-screen graphics are still damnably small and easy to miss, but compared with its rivals, the Fusion is a marvel of human-factors engineering.

As a matter of further inquiry: Why, in the age of “Brave” and “Avatar,” are automotive display graphics so dreary, low-res and childish, like the animation on old slot machines? The Fusion’s display graphics are serviceable, sure, but artless. Car makers have to start offering graphical “skins” to a car’s infotainment and readouts. I’d like all my displays in Old Norse.

Now, about that asterisk: Much has been made of the car’s, let’s call it, homage to Aston Martin, especially in the grille design, and I wish I could shed light on the matter. How, exactly, was it decided that Ford Global Design would plagiarize Aston Martin so brazenly, so pointedly? The wind-narrowed headlight assemblies, the high-velocity character lines? I mean, the Fusion goes so far as to duplicate the five strakes of brightwork inside that distinctive pout. That’s cheeky.

Is it simply a matter of there being a finite number of facial geometries? (You’ll note, perhaps, that the Toyota Avalon looks like the latest product from Ford Design.) Was it, as others have suggested, a case of intellectual property and fair play, since Ford at one time owned Aston Martin? A rebuke? That seems unlikely to me.

With a net 188 hp on tap and curb weight around 3,700 pounds, the Fusion Hybrid is quick enough off the line in city traffic but power reserves fall off at highway speeds. Even so, cane it as you may, the Hybrid never gets shouty.

In any event, the Fusion’s weird Aston Martin-ness was a matter of board-level sign-off, the judgment of designer Chris Hamilton, design chief J Mays and CEO Alan Mulally. I guess we’ll have to wait for the memoirs to get the real story. Meantime, we have a car that looks like a London taxi if Aston Martin built taxis, and that’s not a bad thing.

Here come the numbers: I drove the Fusion Hybrid SE ($27,200 to start) with the luxury package and a long menu of driver-assist systems, including blind-spot monitoring, lane-departure warning, dynamic cruise control and self-parking ($35,365, as tested). The Fusion Hybrid employs the identical powertrain as Ford’s C-Max Hybrid; and, like the C-Max, the Fusion falls short of its claimed 47 miles per gallon in real-world driving, but not by so much. In the Fusion Hybrid, I managed to achieve an absolute minimum mileage of 38.1 mpg. Most of the time I was in the 40s. I’m obliged to point out that 10 years ago, such fuel economy for a big sedan was science fiction.

The vibe in the Fusion Hybrid is one of abiding integration: the subtle slurring of ratios in the continuously variable transmission, the share-the-load cooperation between electric and gas engine (2.0-liter, 141-hp Atkinson-cycle four-cylinder), a sort of light, transparent flickering of power sources. There are some very good engine mounts under there somewhere. With a net 188 hp on tap and curb weight around 3,700 pounds, the Fusion Hybrid is quick enough off the line in city traffic but power reserves fall off at highway speeds. Even so, cane it as you may, the Hybrid never gets shouty.

Mightily refined, quiet, serene, with deep cleverness in every corner, the Fusion Hybrid is an agreeable car; however, the Fusion has many more colors to reveal, thanks to the broad range of available powertrains. I’m rather looking forward to driving the car with the hot little turbo engine and six-speed manual. They could send me the all-wheel-drive-package car, while they’re at it.

There can be no greater tribute to some rank-and-file, made-by-the-million family car: I want to drive it again.

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